Friday top picks: TweakTown's week in review with new video cards from Galaxy and Gigabyte

The VGA labs at TweakTown have been running overtime this week since Galaxy's GeForce GTX 470 GC video card arrived in time for Monday morning's rounds; the first non-reference GTX 470 card to hit town with higher than stock clock rates and a cooler that was designed with dust build-up in mind. Our VGA guru Shane Baxtor also got the time to put it through its paces a little later in the week once again, this time pushing its clock rates even further north to see if it had the talent to outshine the top dog GTX 480.

If it's serious storage that you require, an NAS is without doubt the best way to go about it and if you're looking for enterprise level features this number from Proware has it all. The EPICa Series EN-T800 SAS-ready NAS gives room for up to eight SAS drives, carries all the features you'd expect (and then some) and proved itself capable of delivering solid, undeniably super quick performance. The only issue you'll have is getting your hands on one of these heavy duty units; availability is its weakest link.

In more overclocking antics over at the VGA labs mid-week, Shane whacked the GIGABYTE HD 5870 1GB Super Overclock series video card back into the testbed for some more time in the light. It already shined brightly last week thanks to its significantly greater than stock out-of-the-box clock speeds, but Shane could sense even more performance could be squeezed out of it with some software voltage modding adjustments and northward bar rising on the clockrates. And sure enough, he was right.

How's the ol' rodent going? That thing sitting next to your keyboard you've gotten so accustomed to using for years on end to push a white arrow around the screen that you hadn't even noticed all the feet were worn away underneath. Considered trying a next-gen gaming rodent to see what all the fuss is about? Nathan didn't realize what he'd been missing out on until he got stuck into this roundup which covers four highly popular models in the world of gaming mice; Logitech's G9X, SteelSeries' XAI, Razer's Abyssus and Microsoft's SideWinder X8.

Rounding out the highlights for the week, Crucial has just started shipping out a half-size 128GB capacity model of their well renowned RealSSD C300; the only known SSD series on the market to use Marvell's SATA 6Gbps controller. Chris got hold of the first sample for review to see if it could manage to fight off the SandForce sharks that are eating up the 100GB / 120GB capacity SSD market sector these days.